Israeli soldiers convicted of using 9-year old as human shield during Gaza invasion

IMEMC - Despite repeated Israeli assurances that there were no violations of the law by soldiers during last year's invasion of Gaza, each one of the few incidents actually investigated by the Israeli military has resulted in convictions of the soldiers involved. In the latest such investigation, two soldiers were convicted Sunday of using an 11-year old child [he was 9 at the time] to open suspicious bags that they were afraid to open themselves.

... Instead [of cooperating with a U.N. report], Israeli authorities claimed that they would do their own internal investigation of the invasion, but the extremely small number of incidents investigated, and the very slow pace of the 'investigation', has led Israeli and international human rights groups to question the sincerity of the Israeli effort. These groups also point to past incidents which went uninvestigated by the Israeli army, or so-called 'investigations' which were insufficient and incomplete – on many occasions, never interviewing witnesses to the alleged war crimes, or reviewing video of incidents, but merely taking the soldiers' account of the incident as their sole source of evidence – as in the case of American Rachel Corrie, who was killed by Israeli forces in 2003. more